Category Archives: Sustainability

Landscapes are essential to the quality of life in California. At DVD, we ensure that our designs not only meet the bare minimum requirements for a public park, but that they make life better. One step towards doing this are creating designs, installations and maintenance that can and are water efficient.

It is no mystery that California faces a challenge of limited water supply. That is way at DVD we incorporate new methods and techniques in our landscape designs for efficient water use. Here are just a few methods we utilize to ensure your landscapes are conserving water:

Regular maintenance of irrigation systems

Education of residents and city staff regarding the importance of efficient water use

Preventing over spray, irrigation runoff and low head drainage

Water-efficient landscape designs using low water-use plants

Efficient irrigation systems

Our designers at DVD will work closely with your city in order to design a water wise landscape design. Reach out to us today to go over the many ways we can incorporate water efficiency to make the quality of life in your public landscapes better.

Landscapes that incorporate native plantings promote a thriving local ecology.

Planting landscapes with native plants not only enhances and beatifies our parks but acts as an educational tool for visitors. These plants have been uniquely designed (a century long of evolving) for our gardens and encourage local habitat, such as friendly birds, fluttering butterflies, and beneficial insects. Pollinators attracted to them in the surrounding area can help produce a more abundant fruit tree and vegetable harvest. These landscapes link us to our wild native landscapes and help bridge the gap that development has created over time. The way in which we have maintained many of our public landscapes has had detrimental effects on local and distant environments. Contaminated runoff into our streams and oceans from pesticide and fertilizer use and overuse of finite resources such as water have major implications on our present lives and the ones of future generations.

When using the greatest adapted native plant community for an area (coastal sage scrub and bluff, chaparral, southern oak woodland, etc.), the maintenance, including watering, pruning and fertilizing is drastically reduced. In addition, designs which use plants with differing bloom cycles create a colorful and unique aesthetic look year-round. There is no guessing game about how to treat these plants. Give them what they have been designed to thrive on; native soil without additional fertilizers, minimal supplemental water after establishment, plenty of elbow room to grow, and once a year pruning. Even many varieties of native plants have been developed to be more tolerant of ‘garden settings’, where they may get maintained improperly. Enhancing the beauty of our public spaces, reducing detrimental environmental effects and saving money means native plants should be grown in every public and private space!

DVD is committed to creating public landscapes that create a community while remaining unique, beautiful, and importantly: sustainable.

Our affiliation with LEED, or the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, allows us to identify and quantify the sustainability of our designs. To DVD, Sustainable Public Landscapes means moving forward in the world of design landscape by responding to the pressing environmental land and cultural challenges and initiatives. These challenges and initiatives include an array of little changes that make a big difference in the long run. Low water use, low maintenance native plantings, and landscapes that are designed to be in balance with the local climate and environment while requiring minimal resource inputs are just a few examples of the sustainable efforts DVD puts into their projects in order to meet current trends and requirements.